Mullis and Marconi had lunch and sipped tea, then strolled along Farringdon Road, where Marconi took particular interest in the wheelbarrows of street traders “with their loads of junk, books, and fruit.” By Mullis’s description, this lunch was one of relaxation and ease. Marconi would have described it differently. Ever anxious that someone would beat him to his goal, he now found himself dining and walking for two hours as his apparatus lay in Preece’s office open to inspection by anyone.
At two they returned and rejoined Preece. Marconi was young, thin, and of modest height, but his manner was compelling. He spoke perfect English and dressed well, in a good suit with razor creases. His explanations of the various components of his apparatus were lucid. He did not smile. Anyone happening to glance at him would have gotten the impression that he was much older, though on closer inspection would have noted the smooth skin and clear blue eyes.
Marconi adjusted his circuits. He pressed the telegraph key. A bell rang on the opposite table. He tapped the coherer with his finger and pressed the key again. Again the bell rang.
Mullis looked at his boss. “I knew by the Chief’s quiet manner and smile that something unusual had been effected.”
PREECE LIKED MARCONI. He recognized that Marconi’s coherer was a modification of devices already demonstrated by others, including Lodge, but he saw too that Marconi had put them together in an elegant way, and if the man—this boy—were to be believed, he had succeeded at something that Lodge and the Maxwellians considered impossible, the sending of legible signals not just over long distances but to a point out of optical range.
Preece and Marconi were kindred spirits. Both understood the power of work and everyday practice to reveal truths—useful, practical truths—about the forces that drove the world. In the battle of practice versus theory, Marconi held the promise of becoming Preece’s secret weapon. Marconi was an inventor, an amateur, hardly even an adult, yet he had bested some of the great scientific minds of the age. Lodge had said that half a mile was probably the farthest that electromagnetic waves could travel, yet Marconi claimed to have sent signals more than twice as far and now, in Preece’s office, forecast transmissions to much greater distances with a confidence that Preece found convincing.
Preece recognized that his own efforts to use induction to produce a crude form of wireless communication had reached their practical limits. Most recently he had attempted to establish communication with a lightship guarding the notoriously deadly Goodwin Sands off the English coast. He had strung wire around the hull of the ship and laid a spiral of wire on the sea floor large enough that no matter where the wind, tide, and waves moved the ship, it always was positioned over part of the spiral. By interrupting the current in the spiral, he hoped to induce matching interruptions in the coil on the ship, and in so doing send Morse messages back and forth. The experiment failed. Later Preece would state that Marconi “came to me at a very fortunate time for myself, for I was just then smarting under the disappointment of having made a failure in communicating with the East Goodwin lightship.”
Two years from retirement, Preece understood that his discovery of Marconi might be the last shining thing that history would remember about his long tenure at the British Post Office. Far better to exit as the man who helped introduce the world to a revolution in communication than as an engineer whose own attempts at telegraphy without wires had failed.
The day came to an end when Preece’s coachman appeared and Preece set out in his brougham for his home in Wimbledon, the beat of hooves keeping time in the cool spring air.
IN A LETTER TO HIS FATHER Marconi wrote about the meeting and disclosed a bit of news that must have amazed the elder Marconi, who only a year earlier had been so skeptical of his son’s electrical adventures. “He promised me that, if I wanted to perform experiments, then he would allow me the use of any necessary building belonging to the telegraphic administration in any city or town in the whole of the United Kingdom, as well as ensuring the help (at no cost, of course) of any personnel employed by the administration mentioned above that I might need. He added that he has ships on which I could install and try my equipment in case I wanted to perform an experiment between vessels at sea.”
Preece assigned engineers from his staff to assist Marconi and recruited instrument-builders in the post office mechanics’ shop to modify Marconi’s equipment to make it more robust. Immediately Preece began arranging demonstrations for other government officials.
Soon Marconi found himself on the roof of the post office, sending signals from one rooftop to another, the spark of his transmitter snapping so loudly as to be audible on the street below. In July 1896 he achieved a distance of three hundred yards, well short of what he had done at the Villa Griffone but still impressive to Preece and his engineers.
Preece arranged the most important demonstration yet, one for observers from the army and navy, to take place on the military proving ground Salisbury Plain, near Stonehenge. By day’s end he managed to transmit legible signals to a distance of one mile and three quarters.
The success of the demonstration raised Marconi onto another plane. The War Office wanted more demonstrations; Preece, nearly as delighted as Marconi, reiterated his pledge to provide as much assistance and equipment as Marconi needed. Until this point the intensity with which Marconi pursued his idea had been stoked only from within; now, suddenly, there were expectations from the outside.
MARCONI REALIZED IT WAS NOW crucial to file for a patent for his apparatus. The number of people who had seen his invention was multiplying, and his fear that another inventor might come forward increased in step. He filed a “provisional specification” that established the date of filing and asserted that he was first to achieve the things he claimed. He would have to submit a more complete filing later.
Convinced now that Marconi truly had accomplished something remarkable, Preece decided to announce Marconi’s breakthrough to the world.
In quick succession he gave a series of important lectures, during which he introduced Marconi as the inventor of a wholly new means of communication. He gave the first in September 1896 before a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, known best simply as the British Association, during which he revealed that “an Italian had come up with a box giving a quite new system of space telegraphy.” He gave a brief description and disclosed that it had proven a great success at Salisbury Plain. In the audience were many of Britain’s most famous scientists and, of course, Oliver Lodge and some of his Maxwellian allies, including a prominent physicist named George FitzGerald. Even in the best of circumstances Lodge and FitzGerald found the experience of listening to Preece to be the intellectual equivalent of hearing a fingernail scrape across a blackboard, but now they heard him describe Marconi as if he were the first man ever to experiment with Hertzian waves, and they were outraged. Both believed Lodge had done as much in his June 1894 lecture on Hertz at the Royal Institution.
FitzGerald wrote to a friend, “On the last day but one Preece surprised us all by saying that he had taken up an Italian adventurer who had done no more than Lodge & others had done in observing Hertzian radiations at a distance. Many of us were very indignant at this overlooking of British work for an Italian manufacturer. Science ‘made in Germany’ we are accustomed to but ‘made in Italy’ by an unknown firm was too bad.” Lodge wrote to Preece and complained, “There is nothing new in what Marconi attempts to do.”
The news may have been stale to Lodge and his friends, but it was not to the world at large. Word spread rapidly about this Italian who had
